Director Howard hendrick: One of the nice things that I think we might want to highlight
is this Military Home Town Hero event, where we honor some of our employees who have gone
active in the military and we had a chance to honor Patti Dow
who has been active for a while and came back.
It's always nice to recognize the work that our employees do outside of their jobs 
here at the agency, so...
It's been busy but a good couple of months.
This is kind of the most important thing in my life right now 
so I want to introduce you to my newest grandchild and my daughter. He was born last week.
This is Dominic, so we're very excited about a new grandbaby in our family.
Tonight in Jenks, some of you may be going over there but, 
you're welcome to go to Jenks, if you would like to.
Tonight, we'll have the unveiling of our 2011 edition of the Waiting Child Heart Gallery.
For those of you who may not be familiar with this, 
each year we have about 50 photographers who volunteer and contribute their service 
to take pictures of children who are free for adoption.
Then, we... this gallery is prominently placed in several places across the state.
This is our 2011 gallery of children who are waiting to be adopted.
We've had a lot of success getting kids adopted as a result of this photo gallery.
We're very excited about our 2011 edition.
It's kind of a nice way to continue our efforts to find permanency 
for children in foster care.
I want to say thank you to Raymond Haddock. Where's Raymond at?
Stand up, Raymond.
This has been a very emotional month for us because Raymond's been here for forty years
and... today. Forty years today. Wow.
(applause) 
Commissioner: It seems kind of impossible because he tells everyone he's forty-one.
(laughter)
Director Hendrick: There you go. Started in kindergarten. Is that really good?
I don't know, Raymond do you want to make some comments?
I mean you've earned the right to be heard if you want to say anything.
I'll tell you, we have tremendous respect.
Raymond has served as the Director of the agency prior to my coming here and... 
go ahead Raymond.
Raymond Haddock: Well, I'd just say that when you look back over forty years...
when I went to work I didn't know whether it was going to last a year.
I needed a job, so I didn't know it would be my life's work.
But I'll tell you this when I look back I wouldn't trade anything.
It's an incredible job.
It's an incredible place to work and most of all it's incredible people.
The ones that have already gone on, some of my friends have passed 
but the ones that are working here now - they're incredible. 
The job they do is enormous and they don't get the right thanks for it.
It's been an honor to work with them and it's an honor to serve with you.
You guys do a thankless job, too, and you don't get paid but a little bit for it.
I don't know what else I can say.
I believe in what our agency does. I believe we do it extremely well.
I believe we're doing better now than we have ever done it in our history.
For that, I'm proud to have been a part of it.
I thank you. And I thank you, Howard.
I cant' tell you what this guy means to me personally and to this agency.
Thank you.
Director Hendrick: Thank you, Raymond.
(applause)              
Director hendrick (continues): A lot of responsibility Raymond's carried for a long time.
We're very grateful for his leadership. 
Raymond will be replaced by Mark Jones. Many of you know Mark.
Mark has been the Director of our Office of Client Advocacy since 2005. 
Before that he was a member of the Attorney General's Office for twelve years 
and does a really terrific job. Great attention to detail and very quick learner.
He'll have some things to learn. It's a different job. 
But I think Mark will do a really good job as our new Chief Coordinator Officer, 
which has responsibilities for Aging Services, Developmental Disabilities, 
Child Care Licensing and Child Support Services.
I'm showing Paula even though Paula will be back next month.
You don't get to go this quick but I'm just showing Paula because Paula is retiring also,
at the end of the year.
We'll let Paula make some comments next month.
I'm doing that because I want to introduce her replacement who is Sandra Harrison.
Many of you know Sandra Harrison who served as our Legislative Relations person 
and so Sandra will be in charge as our Chief Administrative Officer.
Chief Administrative Officer involves responsibilities over Human Resources Management, 
all the Property Management, all the policy compliance with the Administrative Procedures Act,
all of the different activities that are involved in administrating the agency.
She fills big shoes because Paula has been there and done a terrific job 
and has a great background as City Manager of Oklahoma City 
and also the Director of Department of Central Services.
But Sandra is plenty capable. She has a terrific background as well.
She's going to be learning a new job also, so people come into new responsibilities 
and it'll take them a little time for them to get up to speed on these things so...
Just to let you know kind of where major new players are aligning.
Program Results in August: we had the highest number of persons on SNAP 
in the history of the state - 622,911 people in August.
That broke our previous record by more than 7,000 people from December of 2010.
So, you can see 280,000 of the 622,000 were children.
That's 30% of all the children in the state were on SNAP during August.
We don't know how September is going to go but you can always say, I mean, 
if you look in prior years September is usually an increase over August.
So, I think we're concerned that primarily, the biggest concern really is 
the rate of jump between July and August.
We haven't had an increase of this magnitude in many, many months.
We had, during the acceleration of the recession, we were adding 10,000 or 15,000 a month 
but we hadn't added 8,000 in a month in many, many, many months.
It's very concerning. We'll see how September works out and go from there.
I want to follow up a little bit on the budget issues for 2012 
as we talked about earlier the budget for the current year is in place. 
As you know last month we... you voted to defer until November the effective date 
of the child care co-pay so we could get an informal, non-binding interpretation 
from the Attorney General as to what we should do, 
as to whether or not our in-house counsel's opinion was appropriate.
Kind of a mixed result from that interpretation.
It's, again, non-binding, which means it didn't go through the conference process, 
it doesn't bind any agency but it's good guidance for us.
It's guidance I think we should weigh very heavily.
The A.G.'s opinion confirmed what our folks said about the co-pay being not a fee increase
but said that our process for adopting the co-pay should be through 
the Administrative Procedures Act  not through the permanent rule-making rule that
had been approved by the Governor and not disapproved by the Legislature.
So, we have a few processes to go through or pursue as a result of that interpretation.
We'll have to figure out... what we hope to do is assess two or three options 
and maybe try to figure out what those options will be and come back to you next month
with a recommendation and we'll cross that bridge.
Hopefully next month you can make a decision about what you want to do.
We'll try to do it with a lot of information about what the options are 
and the consequence of those options.
So that's... we just got the opinion last week so we really haven't had a chance 
to go through what really what all our options might be.
2003, the budget request for 2013, I'm sorry.
The State Budget Work Program for 2012 has about $45 million of one-time money, 
funding recurring costs. 
$33.7 million in state dollars and $11.5 million in TANF over and above the annual block grant.
When we run through the budget request here in a moment, 
which Phil did very well with the special meeting that was held last week.
We won't go through, maybe, as much detail as Phil went through last week with you. 
But the one thing that I think we ought to keep in mind as a result of all that process 
that's not included in the budget request that needs to be thought about. 
And I don't think we need to decide about it today, I think the recommendation that 
is being brought to you by the budget committee is appropriate for today, 
but we may want to come back later and, maybe even amend that request up or down depending upon 
what you want to do with the child care issue because...
Let me give you a little context. 
Many years ago, the Commission voted to not budget or spend below 
$12.5 million of the TANF reserve.
As many of you may know...  I'll just go back and give you some history here.
The TANF Block Grant that was developed by the Federal Government many, many, 
many years ago, gave the states a wide level of flexibility to manage the funds.
What happened as a result of that is that we really went very aggressively 
in improving our child care programs and we spent the money really on child care.
That was the main thing.
We had other things to spend it on as well but a lot of it was...our priority was child care.
Child Care Development Block Grants came along also, so we began to merge 
all of those money in there as well.
In some years, though, because the cash assistance roles were dropping as the dollars 
were being increased in spending for child care, we accumulated reserves. 
And we're glad we did because when the recession hit, we had to use those reserves 
to not have cuts, especially for child care, before we got to 2012.
So, we were able to preserve a lot of things.
We really had some deficit spending with our reserves to be able to support lots 
of programs in the agency just as result of having a TANF reserve.
However, the Commission voted not to go below $12.5 million.
I think that was a pretty wise decision for lots of reasons.
Like we are right now.
We really are teetering on, we could be going into a very significant double dip recession
or we could just be floating, you know, like Western Kansas, in a flat plain for a long time.
I'm not sure, really, what's going to happen.
But that $12.5 million has been a good cushion for us.
Well, if we decide, or if you decide when we come back to you next month 
with the recommendation on what to do about child care... 
one of the things you could choose to do is say, "Well, we just won't put the co-pays 
into place and we'll go ahead and burn down into that $12.5 million TANF reserve now." 
It'll make it more difficult for 2013 but you could vote to do that if you wanted to do that.
Another option that's not here is, as we say here, there is $11.5 million in TANF in excess
of what the Block Grant is.
In other words, we have a fixed amount of federal funds we get every year 
in the TANF Block Grant, state dollars and federal dollars.
Our current budget for 2012 contemplates that we would spend about $11.5 million more
than what our fixed recurring costs are.
In other words, we're going into the TANF reserve about 11.5 but not below the 12.5.
So, we have about $23-24 million reserve, $25 million or something like that.
We're going to go in $11.5 million this year.
So that $11.5 million is not in our budget request for 2013.
We could add it to our budget request for 2013 when we come back to you next month as we
begin to wrap up what to do about child care and those other things.
We may want to supplement our budget request with whatever the deficit is 
on the TANF reserve fund, depending on what you want to do about TANF reserve funds.
So, the good thing about what happened there is I think it became kind of, 
I view the $12.5 million as kind of a flashing yellow light.
"You're getting near the end. You're getting near the end. You've got some choices here 
but you're getting near the end of your ability to really deficit spend." 
Because once we hit the wall it's gone, we don't have any ability to do any further.
So, that's something we can talk about next month but the point is 
we have about $45 million of one-time funds in 2012 funding recurring costs.
Our budget request defers until 2014 the replacement of the $11.5 million of TANF 
and assumes that TANF reserves will be invaded in 2013.
Now, when we come back next month you may decide you don't want to do that.
You may want to try to request this as part of our budget request for 2013 
but we'll cross that bridge next month.
I just want you to be aware of the fact that we have that much one-time money 
actually funding recurring costs and we would need to increase our budget requests 
quite a bit if we're going to go try to replace that money.
Plus we have on the horizon federal budget cuts.
We don't know what's going to happen with the Federal Government but as you can see 
in the numbers we'll show you in a little bit, our state dollars are very, very flat, 
slightly down and the federal dollars are way up and as... 
just for food for example, just because of the SNAP benefits for food stamps, for example.
If we end up with federal cuts that go into food stamps or other kinds of programs, 
that question will be: should some of those dollars be replaced with state dollars?
So, for example, even in the 2012 budget, a significant portion of the challenges we had
in balancing the 2012 budget was an increase in the number of state dollars necessary 
to get the federal dollars on the match for the ADvantage Waiver and the DDSD Waiver, 
all those waivered services.
In fact, that was the main thing that cost us the most pain in terms of making cuts in 2012.
So, all of that is to say, this is on the horizon.
We're just kind of... all that goes into our equation for figuring out our budget request.
Lots of pent-up demand for pay.
We have pay for employees, for rate increases, for lots of other services.
It's the tightest I can remember it being financially.
And, this is the place where it's most likely to have the rubber meet the road 
because the most vulnerable people in the state are coming through our doors 
because they're being effected by this also.
So, that's why this place is such a delicate place because this is kind of the collision 
of the increase in demand with the elimination of resources.
So, that's the reality that we're dealing with.
It's also likely that there'll be less one-time funds available for '13 
than there was for '12 in terms of carry-over.
Here's the budget request.
This was the same document that was reviewed last week 
with a couple of changes that I'll highlight here.
The one-time funds, $33 million, $33.7 million of state funds I mentioned earlier.
The $22.6 million is ARRA funding or stimulus funding.
We have reason to believe that the Legislature really does consider this $22.6 million 
part of our base so we're not as nervous about that $22.6 million as we are... 
just because it's a funding source.
But we are concerned about having a significant portion of that $33.7 million of one-time funds 
there to replace for 2013.
But, I would say, you know, even though you can read these releases from 
the Office of State Finance about revenues being up in...
All of state government has a lot of one-time funds funding one-time costs.
So, I wouldn't put too much... get too excited about these increases because 
the cumulative effect of increases is simply replacing other one-time funds that are present.
Next budget request has to do with our ongoing need for supporting our live support centers.
Let me talk a little bit about this because I'll talk about it in other places.
But we are in the middle of quite a transition for eligibility determination processes 
for food stamps, Medicaid, child care, those kinds of services. 
And that process has been underway for a year and a half or so 
and we're now getting to the place where we're really starting to see the turn.
And by that process I mean, it's taken that much time to get to digitized records,
in other words getting rid of paper, going to a paperless environment. We're not fully there.
A large portion of the state has paper records, some portions of the state 
still have only paper records. But most of us are in a paperless environment.
Plus, on moving things online, this is very important because if we do have a double dip recession, 
if we do add a lot more people to SNAP over the next twelve months or so, we don't have 
the staff to take care of that eligibility determination without this technological change.
That's the only way we're going to be able to take care of people 
in terms of just making sure people get food.
If you remember the last time this recession really hit, in Denver and in Houston you had to wait 
90 days to even get into see somebody to get a food stamp interview.
So, you just couldn't even get service.
So, we have to push more and more of this as best we can 
and our staff are doing an incredible job.
We, as I said before, we have the smallest staff we've ever had, we are serving the most people 
we've ever served,  and we still have this cloud on the horizon about whether or not we'll be able 
to take care of meeting them.
But this, these funds here are needed to continue that effort in terms 
of the transition into the live environment.
We know that, already, that the F-MAP rate for 2013 is going to change 
and we're going to have to have almost $2.3 million more state dollars 
just to keep the programs that are funded with Medicaid flat.
Not going to spend a penny more in gross dollars but the Federal Government 
is not going to participate to the tune of about $2.3 million less.
We'd have to come up with $2.3 million more.
And then we have all these other projected cost increases that are out of our control 
for our employees: health insurance, retirement costs and those things all together total 
about $6.4 million in state funds.
The next group here are client growth.
These are projections about different programs where we know the growth in those programs 
are going to go up and our estimateis that we'll need about $7 million more state dollars 
just to meet, no changing of eligibility, not making anybody more eligible or anything, 
just using current eligibility standards, using current projections 
for what we understand utilization will be, we would need $7 more million state dollars 
just to fund the new clients that we expect to come through the door 
for those programs that are identified.
Then, contractual obligations: some of these increases in the cost of things we don't really 
have much control over, fuel costs, we're losing some of our federal dollars 
for the navigation grant.
$4.2 million is a big item here for some hardware and software.
Our network will need... that's just kind of one phase of our network, about $6.8 million.
I'm not going to go into as much detail as Phil did on each of these lines last week.
Market increases, this is probably the biggest area... we understand the Legislature 
is not going to give us all this money.
But we're criticized sometimes if we don't ask for it.
So, what we've tried to do is be appropriate in terms of how we've computed 
what we've asked for.
And you can see what all these costs are in terms of rate increases for foster care,
rate increases for child care subsidy, ADvantage Waiver providers, 
employee increases for pay and things of this nature.
So, you can identify all those items there that are just market rate adjustments.
And then there are, beginning on line 27 the new item here that has been added from last week 
as item 40, which is the expansion of the Navigator Grant or shelter diversion effort 
that we've talked about in that meeting and that's an estimate of what it would cost to expand
our Navigator Grant so we can divert more folks from participating in our shelters.
We'll talk about shelters later on in the morning as we go along here.
Then items 51 through 62 are more core program needs and we're not going to get this
amount of money but this is the request you're going to be asked to vote on today.
Information items for all of you. 
IT consolidation: we continue to have conversations with the state's CIO for more clarification 
on the deferral of consolidation.
Our understanding of what is happening with consolidation with our agency is that there is
now a recognition that because of the federal cost allocation costs model it creates an
immediate cash flow problem for us were we to get consolidated because the Federal Government
is not going to agree to permit our... the technology that it has helped finance 
to then be used for non-programmatic services that it didn't agree to pay for.
So, in other words, our agreement with the Federal Office of Cost Allocation says that 
we will share costs based upon how much that technology is used.
So we have a random moment assignment and we charge the Federal Child Support Program
for the portion of the services they use.
We charge the Federal Child Welfare Program for the portion they use.
We charge Child Care for the portion that they use.
We charge Food Stamps for the portion they use, Medicaid for the portion they use.
All of this is automated and randomized and allocated and the Federal Government is 
not interested in having our mainframe now be used for Corrections or Transportation
since they don't, Federally, financially participate in Transportation and Corrections.
So I think that now there is an appreciation of the fact that to get cost allocation is going 
to be more challenging than was appreciated.
We're not opposed to working with all the folks who want to talk about consolidation, 
but all those things have to be worked out with the Federal Government before they can 
realistically  be able to have those kinds of conservations. So there's many months away.
I think there is a recognition of the fact that that portion of the plan is going to be more
complex than what was previously appreciated.
The act still has a lot of ambitious goals in it.
How those will be worked out, we're still working on, but at least I think one of our primary 
concerns that has taken us two or three months to finally get appreciated is, I think, appreciated. 
And that is that the cost allocation methodology from the Federal Government 
is more complicated than was appreciated before.
Good news here is we do have a solution for our hot site capacity that I've been very concerned 
about as a result of our budget cuts we had to terminate our contract that would give us 
some hot site capacity if we had an outage.
We've always had data backup, that's not really a problem.
The problem is, how quick can you get back up if you have an outage?
You know, the time of being out is a big problem.
So, the Office of State Finance has come up with a solution, we're going to participate 
in that solution and we're very excited about what that will help us do.
Other pending... as a result of the IT consolidation, that creates a lot of confusion internally 
with DCS and OFS and so we have a lot of IT projects that are muddling through the process.
They're working on them.
People are getting done but I think the confusion about all the approval processes 
has slowed things down a bit.
We're doing the best we can to get it done but that's just kind of the reality of what that means.
Good progress in the last couple of month or so on our SORC/NORCE plan development.
Some of the initial family and staff interviews have been conducted.
We have as mentioned last month some of the... we've hired an outside firm 
to come help us develop the plan.
We have to develop this plan and present it to the Legislature by January 1st.
The Legislature will have until March 1st to disapprove the plan
and we won't deploy any portion of the plan until after March 1st.
So, right now we're in the stakeholder gathering information mode 
and we have the people on site doing that work right now.
And so eventually, before too long, sometime in the next month or so, we should be able to get 
an initial draft of what a proposed plan might look like to continue the long-term operations, 
or what will happen with the operation of SORC and NORCE.
To put this into perspective, I don't want people to be too optimistic or too pessimistic
about either of these options.
There's not going to be a whole lot of savings either way.
The biggest savings for what we're trying to avoid in this cost is the avoidance 
of the capital costs for replacing the infrastructure at SORC and NORCE 
which is 50 to 80 years old.
So, the capital costs are really the cost we're trying to avoid.
And by doing, either using community or privatized FMRs or other kinds of service arrays,
we hope to avoid the long-term capital costs that we would otherwise have to incur 
which could be $30–50 million to replace the infrastructure at those two campuses.
That's the main savings is the  infrastructure, capital cost.
The Health Care Authority and our staff are working together on what they're going to do 
by the new legislation that came out to, at least, put an RFP on the street 
for the administrative operations for the ADvantage Waiver.
That is not complete yet but that's just kind of an FYI to let you know that's in process.
Number of personnel: downsizings continue. 
We've offered, I'm not sure how many volunteer buyout offers so far 
but we continue to reduce the number of our staff to meet our budget projections.
I don't remember what the most recent numbers are but we have about 150 more to go or 100 
or so more to go. What's the number on that?
Phil Motely: I think it's close to 89 or something like that.
Director Hendrick: A little under 100 now left to go to continue 
to just downsize our staff so we can meet our budget projections so...
And, of course we have these key, ne leaders - Tony Bryan, Mark Jones and Sandra Harrison.
And we're working with those on personnel issues.
Benefit eligibility: I mentioned this earlier but I want to talk a little bit more 
about benefit eligibility termination.
At okdhslive.org you can go out and look at that website right now it's a live website.
Eventually, we want to be able to take applications on that website.
It's current, primary focus is to take the renewal information 
for anybody who has a food stamp or Medicaid application.
It will process a large portion of those directly.
Our initial experience of testing this website with some of our county offices, very high.
Because our usual experience on sending notices out is we get about a 20-25% response
of people who get their stuff back in to us timely.
We're seeing about 50% response of getting people back enrolled by just going straight
to the web without even coming to see us.
And they can call the help line that's there as an alternative, so we think this will help us
lift a lot of work off the front line staff so if we do have a challenge with a double dip 
that we'll be ready for it.
Major issues ahead: we're going to roll out the OKDHS Live.
We still have a little bit more imaging to do across the state, clarify our situation with the CIO, 
develop some commissions for alternatives for co-pay by the next meeting 
and then address those information items.
Okay, we're going to get into a lot of data here in a little bit but I thought if... 
before you went to sleep with a lot of data, you want to just look at some executive summary data.
I'll throw up four or five slides here so that once we get into the deep, deep bowels 
of lots of more detailed data you can just... this is kind of the shorthand way to look at things.
This is a really nice chart to show what's happened between 2002 and 2010-11 
and the bars really show the difference between 2002 and 2011.
We've got 2010 in there just so you can see what's happening in the last 12 months.
But you can see in the last ten years in 2002 we had 8,010 employees at the end of 2011. 
We had 7,257 employees, so we're down 9% in employees.
In 2002 we collected $143 million in child support, last year we collected 
$318 million in child support, that's a 122% increase in child support collections.
You can see that in 2002 we were subsidizing 5,798 adoptions, 
last year at year's end we were subsidizing 12,384 adoptions.
That's an increase of 114% in the number of subsidized adoptions.
You can see that during State Fiscal Year 2002 we served 479,744 different people for food stamps.
Now, that's not how many people we average in a month, that's how many different people we
served for at least one month during the year. Okay?
So we probably served in an average month maybe 330,000 people in an average month.
Ten years later, we served 880,000 different people last year on food stamps, 
that's up 100,000 over the 779,000 a year ago. 
So just in the last 12 months, 100,000 people came to see us for food that had never been 
in our office before. Ever.
And you can see that the number of people seeing us for food compared to ten years ago is up 84%.
Again, 9% less staff from the agency.
In 2002 we established 13,082 paternities.
Our Child Support Division this last year established paternities for 20,543 children.
So that's an increase of 57% in terms of the number of paternities that were established.
In 2002 we were serving 13,938 on the ADvantage Waiver for at least part of the year.
This last year we had 21,341 different people on the waiver for some part of the year.
That's an increase of 53% over the last ten years.
Commissioner: What's the ADvantage Waiver?
Director Hendrick: The ADvanatge Waiver is the alternative to nursing home care.
Basically what happens is you get to have home health services at about 
one third of the total cost to an annual nursing home but your financial and medical
eligibility is identical to nursing home eligibility.
So it saves the state a tremendous amount of money and so we can see 
the number of people getting that service has increased by about 53% in the last decade.
The number of persons getting DDSD family support payments, these are persons 
who are not on the waiver who are just getting cash assistance while they have a child 
who may need some form of additional help for developmental disabilities increase by 46%.
The number of people on the DDSD Waiver increased by about 27%.
Lots of people who are still on a waiting list, we might talk about that later on as well.
That's a big challenge for us in terms of our budget request to get those needs met also.
This is just kind of another way to look at the SNAP numbers.
This is the average monthly participation for SNAP.
These other numbers here are different people here in the course of the year.
The first numbers you saw were number of people in a particular month.
This is average number of people per month.
609,000 people in an average month in the last year were on SNAP.
That's our highest participation rate ever, up about 50,000 — 40,000 I guess it is over... 
well, it is 50,000, over a year ago, in an average month.
Child Support collections up 6.19% over a year ago.
Finalized adoptions, down a little bit but the reason for them being down is because 
we had less children in foster care at the beginning of the year.
So can see at the beginning of this year we started this fiscal year with 7,970 kids 
in foster care which is our lowest number in many years.
Still finalized 1,141 adoptions. Okay, that's the executive summary.
Let's run through the more detailed view and I will try to fly through it because... 
you want to take a break here and do your deal?
Commissioner: I think that'd be appropriate.
Director Hendrick: Let me just take about a five or ten minute break 
and let the chairman handle an issue here. Go ahead.
Chairman DeVaughn: We have a lot of distinguished people here in
the audience today but we have two that are very special.
I'd like for them to come forward: Dr. Young, Bob Rawlings.
I'm going to do these, so I don't show favoritism, I'll do them alphabetically.
I'm sure you're used to being on the end.
(laughter)
A special friend of the Commission, Bob Rawlings let me read this to you.  If I can read it.
Whereas Robert "Bob" Rawlings of Edmond was appointed to the Oklahoma Commission for Human Services 
by Governor Henry in December of 2008, and whereas Bob has been a tireless advocate 
for OKDHS Aging Services and Developmental Disabilities Services, 
served on the Commission's Budget Committee and also served as the former chair 
on the State Council on Aging; and whereas Mr. Rawlings has brought his business knowledge, 
his community spirit, his dedication to strengthen families and the strong leadership 
to a Commission and Agency that will be forever grateful for his selfless contributions.
Therefore be it resolved that Oklahoma Commission for Human Services presents this
certificate of appreciation to Bob Rawlings for his years of service to the citizens of
Oklahoma and the Human Services Commission.
Be it further resolved the Human Services Commission sends best wishes to Bob 
and his family in all future endeavors.
(applause)
And last but not least Dr. Young.
Whereas Dr. George E. Young, Sr. of Oklahoma City appointed 
to the Oklahoma Commission of Human Services by Governor Henry in December of 2005, 
does it seem like it was that long ago?
When you're having fun, time flies.
Whereas Dr. Young has been a tireless advocate for the Agency serving 
as Chair of the Budget Committee and also served as a Board Member 
of the Red Cross of Central Oklahoma,
Leadership Oklahoma, United Way of Oklahoma City and the Areawide Agency on Aging
among others; and whereas Dr. Young has brought his business knowledge, 
his community spirit, his faith, his dedication, his strength in family 
and his strong leadership to the Commission and an Agency that will also forever be grateful.
Therefore be it resolved that the Oklahoma Commission for Human Services expresses its
sincere appreciation to Commissioner, Dr. Young for his years of faithful service to the citizens 
of Oklahoma and the Human Services Commission.
Be it further resolved that the Human Services Commission sends its best wishes to George E. Young, Sr. 
and his family in all future endeavors.
(applause)
Director Hendrick: Let's get, I think they want to get a picture with you guys with the camera.
You guys may even want to have a comment tor two, I don't know.
Do you and George...can you face...come over here George.
Chairman DeVaughn: They had our best side.
(laughter)
Director Hendrick: I don't know George and Bob may have a comment they want to make.
Chairman DeVaughn: You can even do it in unison.
Robert Rawlings: Well I just want to say that it's a heartbreaking decision to have to resign 
from the Commission and I went against a lot of medical advice and family advice
and I wouldn't take anything for the time I spent working with two great agencies in this state 
in the Department of Mental Health, when I was employed by the state and then on this Commission 
and with Aging Services Division.
It's been a pleasure to do these things and I wish only the best for the Agency and the steep
challenges that you have before you.
And I'll always be following you as best I can.
Dr. George Young: Well, I would say what a great experience it has been 
to serve with all of those I had a chance to serve with.
Chairman, it has been my pleasure to serve under your leadership 
and Executive Director Hendrick under your leadership.
It has been a wonderful, wonderful experience.
I do leave with mixed emotions, just completing a term for someone who, Dr. Munnell who died 
in office, so Governor Fallin decided to import someone else to that position.
Two things that I want to leave you with: one is you always start with a disappointment first.
The disappointment is that I could not leave here without the opportunity to express comments
at the meeting without saying I am very disappointed that the Governor did not appoint an
African-American or Hispanic to this Commission to help the diversity of it 
and I think that hurts the Commission's ability to completely look 
and be completely representative of the State of Oklahoma.
On the other hand I want to say to those that I had a chance to serve with over the years,
listen- don't ever let anyone ever say anything to you that goes against your 
personal commitment because each of you I have served with and had conversations with 
and Dr. Peck, you and I sat together and I know your love for the people of Oklahoma.
Don't let anyone persuade you or try to convince you that you are not doing the best job 
that you possibly can in this moment in what we have and I say that to each of you.
Commissioner you have done a wonderful job in light of all that we have gone through.
I regret that I am not going to be around to be able to stay and fight with you.
But know this: I'm on the outside but I'm still fighting with you.
Thank you and God bless you.
(applause)